I didn’t want to let Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column pass without comment. Here’s the concluding snippet:
Following the Cold War, the American foreign-policy establishment embraced the tragically misguided belief that we could set aside traditional forms of great-power competition and balance-of-power diplomacy while focusing our efforts on “global issues†like human rights, climate change and the construction of an ever-stronger set of international institutions operating under an ever-more-pervasive system of international law.
That destructive consensus rested on two mistaken perceptions. The first was that America’s victory in the Cold War was final and America’s economic and military power plus our diplomatic prestige ensured our unchallengeable supremacy for decades.
The second was that the so-called rules-based world order we were using our power to build would be popular abroad and uncontroversial at home. The economic benefits of the free-market, free-trading world system were so great that no serious country abroad or political movement at home would be insane enough to challenge it. And the elegant international system was going to be so ethically beautiful and politically inspiring that countries all over the world would be irresistibly drawn into it.
The war in Afghanistan illustrates the feckless nature of two decades of American foreign policy. In Afghanistan, we expanded our objectives, and our war aims shifted from removing and punishing a government that sheltered the terrorists who engineered 9/11 to changing the culture and political system of a society very different from our own.
Unfortunately, in the midst of our inspiring campaigns of institution-building and civil-society promotion, we neglected one tiny detail: We never developed and implemented a military strategy capable of winning the war.
The same disastrous mix of mission creep and strategic incompetence that wrecked our Afghan policy threatens our global strategy today. Our plans for world order grow increasingly ambitious and elaborate even as the security underpinnings of that system become dangerously weak. Global issues are real, and hard power on its own is never enough. But if you don’t get the hard-power issues right, nothing else matters much.
My concern about repivoting towards the Middle East is a little more prosaic than that. Let me put it into the form of a question. Can Israel, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey ever be our ally in fact rather than just in theory? I don’t believe that an Israel committed to being a Jewish state, Islamist Saudi Arabia, or Turkey under Erdogan can be our allies let alone our friends. I think that Israel is our client, and Saudi Arabia something between a client and a hostile non-belligerent. Kemalist Turkey was our ally; Turkey under Erdogan is something between a client and a hostile non-belligerent. Iran, of course, is something between a hostile non-belligerent and an enemy.
What is there to pivot to?
Update
I have had a great deal to do with that country including a three-year tour as Defense and Army attaché in the US Embassy. This gave me the status of Counselor of Embassy. And I have been there many, many times in various capacities. I can’t say that I ever liked the place and I share that sentiment with many Muslims who are not subjects of the Saudi state. I was lucky when I lived there that even though a Christian I was protected by my diplomatic status.
In spite of all the fancy hotels and foreign flunky-built infrastructure Saudi Arabia remains a frightening, medieval mind set place where an ability to speak Arabic well merely guarantees that a foreigner will be thought a dangerous spy. That I was an AMERICAN diplomat meant absolutely nothing to them. To the Saudis the necessity of supposedly cordial mutual relations with ANY country in the non-Muslim world is an unfortunate necessity. Iran and other Shia dominated places? Well. they are thought to be deluded and murtad (apostate) in their beliefs.
For the Saudi state and much of the “citizen†population all relations with non-Muslim states and companies must be TRANSACTIONAL. All. If you want to do business with the Saudis, you must have something of value to trade. Sentiment does not enter into this. Example – In the past in return for our willingness to protect them from people with actual strength and to sell them our military toys they were willing to surreptitiously give some of us money with which to corrupt our own political system.
Like it or not, Turkey is a US ally. Until either NATO expels Turkey or the US leaves NATO, we are “best buds’. I believe there are still US nukes in Turkey.
It is probably a good idea to think long and hard about who you let into your little club.
On paper Turkey is an ally or, as I put it in the body of the piece, Kemalist Turkey was an ally. When you consider Turkey since 2000 (even before Erdogan) it’s not entirely clear how you’d distinguish friend from foe.
I understand your point, but that piece of paper makes them an ally.
NATO is a “Catholic marriage”.
There is no clause or process to suspend or expel a member in the treaty. Unless the US decides to quit NATO, the US is bound by treaty to Turkey’s aid.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia are moving into the Russia/China orbit, along with Iran and Argentina, and becoming members of BRICS. Iran gets full membership this fall in the SCO. While these groups are in no way alliances (India and China are both in BRCS and SCO), there is a tide running against the West, and countries all over the Global South are hedging their bets. The reality is that the West, all 1 billion of us, is being isolated from the rest of the world, 7 billion of them. And it is our own policies that is driving the isolation.
Regarding Erdogan, we did support a coup against him, and we do protect Gulen Fellah (misspelled?). We consistently support Greece against Turkey. The whole S-400/F-35 brouhaha occurred and persists, because Israel would not let us sell the Patriot system to Turkey when the Turks asked us for it.
Turkey is the most important asset we have in the Middle East and Southern Europe. If Turkey leaves NATO and allies with Russia/China, our position in the Middle East and Southern and Eastern Europe is hopeless. The loss of Turkey would be a strategic disaster of the highest order, equivalent to losing Germany to Russia/China.
I do not think NATO has a mechanism for expelling members, if it did I would evict everyone east of Germany. There is a way for countries to leave.
We actually need to disengage from the Middle East, or at least put it on the back burner. Nearly the entirety of our Middle Eastern policy is controlled by Israel (via their devotees in Congress and the Presidency), and it serves their immediate, short-term desires, not ours. A withdrawal from Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf states, and a rapprochement with Iran (and Turkey) should be the first order of business.
We also really, really need to stop the drift into war with Russia and China, which now appears inevitable, and maybe quite soon.
Mead starts off strong, but then has a major fundamental misunderstanding:
The problem with this theory is that military force could not achieve our ends in Afghanistan. Tons of people spent two decades attempting to come up with a “military strategy capable of winning the war” and failed. The reason is that there was no way to “win the war” while a safe haven existed in western Pakistan, while the Pakistan government played a two-faced role, and while Afghan society itself was tribalized and divided. The military instrument (in a Clausewitzian sense) cannot achieve the desired political ends.
You’d think someone like Mead would know better, but alas.
He doesn’t get any better here:
Actually, it’s the opposite of that final sentence – if you’re relying on hard power, your strategy has probably already gone wrong. And I would think it should be obvious at this point that there is no “getting the hard power issues right” when hard power can’t solve the problem you want to solve, or achieve the political ends you want to achieve. Mead should know that hard power doesn’t drive the bus and isn’t and shouldn’t be the primary means to achieve strategic political ends.
Saudi Arabia is as good an example as any of this. Hard power cannot change their society and cannot make or compel them to be the liberal secular democrats we’d like them to be. And soft power can’t accomplish that on reasonable timescales. So then how should we think about Saudi Arabia? For us, they are useful as a bulwark against Iran, as a source of global petroleum. We do this by making them a de facto protectorate, which denies others (China, perhaps Russia) the influence we have with them. The ability to project global military force buttresses that, nothing more.
Fundamentally one must consider alternatives and tradeoffs. What’s the alternative should the US politically and militarily abandon Saudi Arabia? I think it’s pretty clear they will seek to find another client and then what will our moralistic self-satisfaction have gained? We ought to keep them in the tent until they are no longer useful, and then we can safely ditch them and if they go to the Chinese, then we will no longer care.
As for NATO, current events show that rules developed to deal with the Cold War don’t work as well in a post-Cold War context. Structurally, it’s designed to require an adversary and that adversary is always going to be Russia.
Let’s say Putin gets overthrown and there is a democratic regime elected in Russia. Does anyone think the Baltic states or Poland would ever allow even a democratic Russia to be part of NATO (let’s assume even a democratic Russia would want to be a junior partner to the US)?
And then what is the purpose of NATO at that point – the US forcing Europe to play nice with each other for all eternity? It all seems like a house of cards to me.
The vital point is that was true in November 2001. It didn’t suddenly materialize after we had invaded. If those were the military objectives of the invasion and occupation, they were impossible from the outset.
What’s the lesson here? I think that if the objective can’t be achieved by killing people and breaking stuff it shouldn’t be a military objective. Clearly, that’s a message that hasn’t been learned.
Consider Ukraine. IMO the only outcome that would achieve the objective is to divide Russia up into chunks small than or equal in size to Ukraine and I see no way that the strategy being used will accomplish that objective.
I sincerely wish that people who should know better would stop using the words “hard power” when what they mean is military force. Hard power includes both military force and economic pressure.
“I sincerely wish that people who should know better would stop using the words “hard power†when what they mean is military force. Hard power includes both military force and economic pressure.”
I often forget that hard power includes economic coercion – and part of that is that I think it shouldn’t.
“The vital point is that was true in November 2001. It didn’t suddenly materialize after we had invaded. If those were the military objectives of the invasion and occupation, they were impossible from the outset.”
I partially agree. The goals shifted that first year and eventually settled on nation-building as AQ retreated to the safety of Pakistan.
Success in nation-building is not a military strategy – military force is only a supporting element, and the key factors for success are non-military. I think most realized early on that the US could not completely defeat the Taliban insurgency militarily because of the safe haven in Pakistan and other reasons. So the goal became to keep the Taliban at bay long enough for a legitimate Afghan government and institutions to form that could compete and defeat the Taliban insurgency from political, social, and military angles.
That was the whole intention behind Obama’s surge – to put the Taliban back on its heels to give “space” for the Afghan government and institutions to grow.
The problem with the strategy wasn’t really the military element – we did give 20 years of “space” for an Afghan alternative to the Taliban to grow and challenge the Taliban for legitimacy. That a Potemkin village developed instead is not a failure of military strategy.
I think that we could have succeeded in nation-building in Afghanistan but not while leaving Afghanistan was a priority. Those were always in conflict. We could have succeeded the way Alexander did—by settling a population there and remaining forever.
I thought from the very start that our Afghanistan invasion should have been a punitive raid, preferably by air. No nation-building involved. It would need to have been one heckuva punitive raid.